Microsoft has – rather quietly – released an preliminary update for Microsoft Outlook 2007 that will also be included in the soon to be coming Microsoft Office Service Pack 2. The Outlook 2007 update increases the performance and responsiveness of Microsoft’s desktop email client noticeably. Four key areas are improved by the patch including startup, shutdown, general responsiveness and folder or view switches.
The general responsiveness of Outlook 2007 has been increased by reducing the I/O disk usage processes and UI response times. Startup has been improved by moving long operations from the initial startup while shutdown time was decreased by making Outlook exit predictable. Finally the folder and view switching benefits from improved view rendering and folder switching routines.
The update is currently classified as a hotfix meaning that users will have to request it by providing their email address on a form at the Microsoft website. Users who do use Microsoft Outlook 2007 as their main email client will benefit from the update to a large extent. Startup time might be slower during first startup because of a one-time data structure upgrade.
Microsoft has updated their Mailbox Storage Size Guidance to reflect the performance and responsiveness improvements when utilizing Cached Exchange Mode with respect to mailbox/OST sizes:
- Up to 5 gigabytes (GB): This size should provide a good user experience on most hardware.
- Between 5 GB and 10 GB: This size is typically hardware dependent. Therefore, if you have a fast hard disk and much RAM, your experience will be better. However, slower hard drives, such as drives that are typically found on portable computers or early generation solid state drives (SSDs), experience some application pauses when the drives respond.
- More than 10 GB: This size is where short pauses begin to occur on most hardware.
- Very large, such as 25 GB or larger: This size increases the frequency of the short pauses, especially while you are downloading new e-mail. Alternatively, you can use Send/Receive groups to manually sync your mail.
The service pack for Outlook 2007 contains additional improvements for components like the Calendar or Outlook search among others. Interested users can read up on the Outlook 2007 SP1 update by visiting the extensive Microsoft Knowledgebase article and an official blog post covering the release announcement.
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5 Responses to “Outlook 2007 SP1”
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[...] All this will be included in an SP2 release, which doesn’t have a firm release date yet, but by providing an email address and agreeing to a hotfix installation, Outlook 2007 SP1 users can get these pretty significant performance boosts installed now. The team says they’re not waiting until SP2 because of “their quality and the rigorous testing that has been done with them,” so you can perhaps set aside your well-founded eyebrow raises about Outlook service packs. The hotfix is free to download, works for Outlook 2007 users runing SP1 on Windows only. Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 February 2009 Cumulative Update [via gHacks] [...]
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[...] All this will be included in an SP2 release, which doesn’t have a firm release date yet, but by providing an email address and agreeing to a hotfix installation, Outlook 2007 SP1 users can get these pretty significant performance boosts installed now. The team says they’re not waiting until SP2 because of “their quality and the rigorous testing that has been done with them,” so you can perhaps set aside your well-founded eyebrow raises about Outlook service packs. The hotfix is free to download, works for Outlook 2007 users runing SP1 on Windows only. Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 February 2009 Cumulative Update [via gHacks] [...]
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[...] ghacks.net http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/26/outlook-2007-sp1/ Share and [...]
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[...] Office Outlook 2007 February 2009 Cumulative Update [via gHacks] Share [...]
Thanks. This really did work. I am very happy with the way it works now. Outlook is a lot more snappier.